I found it irritating that you could run BF1942 in 1080p, get some decent textures and models, but the UI was always scaled up and ugly. So I gave making a UI replacement a shot. I've tried to stay as true to the original as possible, just everything should now have sharper curves, less compress/scaling artifacts, etc.

Menu renders at 1080p, and has a new background for the Esc menu. New menu background movie contains 720p clips from "Apocalypse: The Second World War".

Background music for main menu from London Philharmonic Orchestra.

All intro movies can be skipped. They're 720p, although playback renders at 1080p.

Bold font replaced. Can't really do much here to get sharper curves, as the fonts come from bitmaps and it seems you can't control the font scaling.

It took about four days, and the improvement while playing is quite noticeable (the screenshots don't do it justice). It's spoiled by BF's built-in font-scaling though; if anyone knows how to address this, it would be greatly appreciated.

The mod currently uses the Merciless Creations mod as a base, but I'm sure it can be altered for vanilla BF1942 too. I've included a download link here to the fully patched Merciless mod, as the installers provided on the site weren't exactly friendly.

I've included the Adobe Illustrator file I worked with in case it helps someone expand the mod, or do their own work -- everything else was done directly in Photoshop.

=========================================================================Known problems (if anyone knows how to fix, would be greatly appreciated)=========================================================================I can't control the scaling of fonts used in the game. This prevents putting nicer fonts in.Whenever a level ends, the mod unloads. I don't know why.The included .exe likely have version mismatch problems with online servers. You can use the Origin .exe to bypass this, but you'll lose the high-res main-menu and video playback.Load screens are still the original low resolution versions.

=================================Hey, the movies aren't skippable!=================================That's because you need to boot BF with the mod. Create a shortcut to the .exe, and add "+game 'MC1942'" to the end of the target, without the quotation marks. Launch by the shortcut, and all should be sweet.

==========New things==========All intro movies can be skipped.720p EA, DICE and legal movies at intro, renders at 1080p.Menu renders at 1080p.Background music for menu from London Philharmonic Orchestra.1080p background image for the esc menu.Bold font replaced. Can't really do much here to get sharper curves, as the fonts come from bitmaps and it seems you can't control the font scaling.New menu background movie at 720p, clips from "Apocalypse: The Second World War".High res buttons.High res logos.Mouse cursor replaced.High res menu frames, and in-game frames.High res radio command graphics.High res health/ammo/heat bars.

==========Executable==========The executable is taken from Widescreen gaming forum (http://www.wsgf.org/), and hex edited so the menu and movies render in 1080p. Here's how it was done.

The mmenu and movies in BF1942 usually render at 800x600. In hex, this is 0320 0258. This is stored in the executable byte-shifted twice to the left, so we're looking for an entry of 20 03, followed not too far after by 58 02.

We then want to replace this with the byte-shifted code for 1920x1080 -- that is, 80 07 38 04.

To make the menus render at 1080p, at offset 002B1140 this was changed:

C7 41 30 20 03 00 00 C7 41 34 58 02 00 00 C7 41

To:

C7 41 30 80 07 00 00 C7 41 34 38 04 00 00 C7 41

To make the movies play back in 1080p, at offset 002B0280 this was changed:

30 20 03 00 00 C7 40 34 58 02 00 00 C7 40 38 20

To:

30 80 07 00 00 C7 40 34 38 04 00 00 C7 40 38 20

It isn't easy to do this to the Origin executable, as it's in a wrapper that makes finding the resolution entry impossible.

Last edited by unexpectedpanda on Sun Jul 05, 2015 12:22 pm, edited 1 time in total.

Works this fix for all BF 1942 mods and my display screen: "1366x768" too?I have the problem, if i stretch it with the FHSW fix patch, the tipping words i cannot recognize also good anymore.For FHSW i can change a text fille, but for the other mods nothing?Little bit complicated.:-/

It should work for pretty much anything, although it would require a few changes first -- it currently makes use of Merciless Creation's mod structure. I think the next step would be to divorce it from that structure (not too large a task, I think), and then users could add it to whatever mod they liked through the appropriate init.con file. I've yet to play with this though.

buschhans wrote:and my display screen: "1366x768" too?

Resolutions below 1920x1080 haven't been tested. In theory it should work so long as you use the original .exe (or indeed, the .exe from the widescreen gaming forum) rather than the new one found in the archive. The reason for this is the exe in the archive forces a resolution of 1080p for the menu and movie playback, and I'd imagine most screens would blank out at being fed a resolution they can't handle.

I'm really not sure you'd benefit from this mod with such a low resolution either. At 1366x768, you might get a *tiny* bit more fidelity scaling down high-res graphics than scaling up low-res graphics, but I'm guessing it'll be much of a muchness really.

Ultimately including an on-the-fly .exe patcher into an installer and a graphics config tool external to BF1942 would be ideal.

buschhans wrote:I have the problem, if i stretch it with the FHSW fix patch, the tipping words i cannot recognize also good anymore.For FHSW i can change a text fille, but for the other mods nothing?Little bit complicated.:-/

I'm not sure what this means. I haven't looked into FHSW at all, so am unable to help here.

It should work for pretty much anything, although it would require a few changes first -- it currently makes use of Merciless Creation's mod structure. I think the next step would be to divorce it from that structure (not too large a task, I think), and then users could add it to whatever mod they liked through the appropriate init.con file. I've yet to play with this though.

I've done it myself and play vanilla BF1942 online with your new graphics now. Works fine, the game looks much better with it.

unexpectedpanda wrote:Resolutions below 1920x1080 haven't been tested. In theory it should work so long as you use the original .exe (or indeed, the .exe from the widescreen gaming forum) rather than the new one found in the archive. The reason for this is the exe in the archive forces a resolution of 1080p for the menu and movie playback, and I'd imagine most screens would blank out at being fed a resolution they can't handle.

I'm really not sure you'd benefit from this mod with such a low resolution either. At 1366x768, you might get a *tiny* bit more fidelity scaling down high-res graphics than scaling up low-res graphics, but I'm guessing it'll be much of a muchness really.

Ultimately including an on-the-fly .exe patcher into an installer and a graphics config tool external to BF1942 would be ideal.

I have 1440x900 on my notebook and everything is OK except one thing - when the game menu loads first time, it's still 800x600 and looks a bit "blurred". But after loading a map menu gets the same resolution as ingame, 1440x900.

unexpectedpanda wrote:I really just want to be able to modify the font scaling

Font system is quite cumbersome... What exactly do you want to do?P.S. May I use your method of changing menu resolution (described in Readme file) in my version of BF1942.exe? I'm developing a mod and a patch for widescreen (old version, from 2004) + 128 bots support, so I'd like to update it. All credits will be given. Plus, I think your work should be distributed because it's really good...

one wrote:I've done it myself and play vanilla BF1942 online with your new graphics now. Works fine, the game looks much better with it.

Cool

one wrote:I have 1440x900 on my notebook and everything is OK except one thing - when the game menu loads first time, it's still 800x600 and looks a bit "blurred". But after loading a map menu gets the same resolution as ingame, 1440x900.

Interesting... I'll have to do some more tests when I get a slab of free time.

one wrote:Font system is quite cumbersome... What exactly do you want to do?

The size that fonts are rendered at (both menu and game) is over-scaled, creating the blurred hodge podge that appears now on high res screens. The bitmap already uses a font at 6pt, so replacing it with a smaller font doesn't work -- you lose legibility and even then it's still scaled up too far. Ideally I'd like the game to render the fonts at around half the size they're being rendered now, so I can get sharper, perhaps intentionally anti-aliased fonts in there.

one wrote:P.S. May I use your method of changing menu resolution (described in Readme file) in my version of BF1942.exe? I'm developing a mod and a patch for widescreen (old version, from 2004) + 128 bots support, so I'd like to update it. All credits will be given. Plus, I think your work should be distributed because it's really good...

unexpectedpanda wrote:The size that fonts are rendered at (both menu and game) is over-scaled, creating the blurred hodge podge that appears now on high res screens. The bitmap already uses a font at 6pt, so replacing it with a smaller font doesn't work -- you lose legibility and even then it's still scaled up too far. Ideally I'd like the game to render the fonts at around half the size they're being rendered now, so I can get sharper, perhaps intentionally anti-aliased fonts in there.

Thank you!Also, if you're interested, here are Full HD loadscreens made by Dice for BF1942 10th anniversary: http://yadi.sk/d/nhggwyam3UOWII think it'd be nice to use them in your mod for vanilla BF1942